Nuclear war, post apocalypse, barren and lifeless wastelands. Lifeless? Not so much! Mutated insects have made their home in a bomb shelter and they're set on exploring the world. Let this point&click adventure welcome you to a hilariously bizarre end time world and join the roaches Jim and Bud on their journey to the surface.

November 4, 2014

Exactly one year ago Journey of a Roach got released. To celebrate this, all the insects decorated the bunker for Jim's first birthday! There are presents, party hats and exploding stuff! There's even a rumor about an extra achievement you can get, something about finding hidden birthday candles...

To play the birthday version of Journey of a Roach you have to start a new game and confirm that you want cake. Of course you can still play the normal version if you don't like cake. This birthday version will be playable until 31. November, after this date you won't be able to start a new birthday game.

We fixed some more bugs and looked into the 64bit Linux problems (still working on that one though). For more detailed info please check out the change log

Reviews

“Journey of a Roach features an immersive cartoon world inhabited by lovable insect characters and mind-bending directional mechanics that will surely resonate with players long after the game is over.”
4/5 – Adventuregamers

Full Controller Support

About This Game

Nuclear war, post apocalypse, barren and lifeless wastelands.
Lifeless? Not so much!
Mutated insects have made their home in a bomb shelter and they're set on exploring the world.
Let this point&click adventure welcome you to a hilariously bizarre end time world and join the roaches Jim and Bud on their journey to the surface.

Journey of a Roach tells the story of two roach-buddies, who want nothing but see the surface world.
On their way up, they meet all kinds of bizarre and ludicrous insects inhabiting the post-apocalyptic earth. In atmospheric 3D point&click adventure style you'll take control of Jim the roach through the bomb shelter, effortlessly crawling your way along walls and ceilings. This innovative and dynamic game mechanic creates opportunities for a wholly new puzzle design. Fondly designed speechballoons offer an unconventional new dialogue experience and the soundtrack delivers and atmospheric, post-apocalyptic mood.

Key Features

Point&click Adventure in a unique environment

Crawl along walls and ceilings, exploring secret underground

Innovative controls create dynamic game mechanics

Atmospheric 3D comic style world

Two charming, memorable protagonists with humorous, nonverbal means of communication

Game Size:+ 4 seasons- short playtime (3 hours)- no extras- no replay value

Daedalic, creator of Edna - and Deponia ™ series is successful not only as a development studio, but also proves as a publisher, a nose for good indie games.Mutated insects have made their home in an air raid shelter and they discover the world you go. Let this point and click adventure welcome you to a hilariously bizarre end time world and join the roaches Jim and Bud on their way to the surface. The earth. Devastated. No survivors. But a small cockroach running around on the surface, rummages through the garbage.

The main gimmick of the game is the ability to climb any flat surface and crawl on the ceilings and walls of an environment. This expands the area in which objects are hidden, which can be added to your inventory and combined in order to solve a puzzle. The places where you cannot climb are usually shown by pipes on the wall or other obstacles.Since Journey of a Roach has no dialogue and isn't heavy on story, the majority of the experience comes down to solving puzzles. This is where the game's point-and-click inspirations are clearest; most puzzles boil down to the tried-and-true "find item in one area, use item somewhere else" mechanics.Most puzzle solutions do make logical sense (as opposed to requiring seemingly random item combinations that lead to more guesswork than brainpower, like many adventures of old.

Although the trip itself is charming, it's the puzzles that keep you ahead. None of the puzzles are very challenging, and you can finish the game in a single two- to three-hour session.It’s also nice and smart with its audio, and the insectoid chattering is cute. It is, it has to be said, okay. You may wish for a longer adventure for the price. I would only recommend this game to die-hard fans of the point-and-click genre, butI must say, the more Daedalus games I play, the more I like them all in all.

Score: 68 / 100gamestar.de

Sorry for my bad english.Thanks for reading! If you Like my Review, give me a Thumbs up in Steam.Your help is greatly appreciated :)

Journey of a Roach is a short but cute 3D Puzzle Adventure slash Point and Click game and a result of a colaboration between German P'n'C veterans Daedalic Entertainment and the relatively young studio Koboldgames from Switzerland.

STORYYou play as Jim, a cockroach living in an underground bomb shelter that is controlled by an army of ants. When your cockroach buddy accidentally crashes through the floor and gets captured by the ants, you set out on a quest to rescue him, end the ants' terror regime and find a way to get out of the bomb shelter and to a peaceful place somewhere else.

HUMORThere aren't any actual dialogues in the game. All of the communication between the characters takes place in the form of incomprehensible sounds (sort of similar to baby mumbling) and comic bubbles with drawings that show what the characters try to say. Some of those illustrations are pretty hilarious and probably wouldn't be remotely as funny, as if the characters would actually say 'I found this plunger. Shall I put it on my head?'. It's not the kind of humor that makes you laugh out loud and spit your drink on the screen, but it's amusing and cheerful throughout the entire game.

VISUALSWhile the game is advertised as a Point and Click game, it hasn't much to do with the usual pre-rendered, stiff and sometimes blurry enviroments known from other P'n'C games. It's actually best compared with The Walking Dead where pretty much everything is in 3D and where you can freely move around while still retaining the classical P'n'C feel of finding objects, combining them, solving puzzles and so on. Due to the comic style of the visuals, you don't have to worry about blurry textures or anything, either - it all looks sharp and just sooooo cute. :D

GAMEPLAYBeing a P'n'C adventure at its heart, the game adds some welcome addition to the fairly worn out genre as it basically plays like a sidescroller where you control Jim with WASD (or the arrow keys, respectively) and the actual item handling is done with your mouse (you can also use a gamepad, if you wish to do so - works great). To add to that (and since you're a cockroach, of course) you can also climb on walls and ceilings to progress through the levels, reach items or just avoid being seen by the ants.

It takes a bit getting used to and you sometimes accidentally climb a wall or a crate that you just wanted to pass, but overall the mechanic works great and gives you another way of freedom to explore your enviroment.

Puzzle-wise, the game is fairly easy as most puzzles only consist of picking up items, combining them and using them on something or someone, but since it's mostly quite obvious what has to be used how and where, they shouldn't provide that much of a challenge for experienced P'n'C or Puzzle game players. However, since the devs probably tried to also appeal to a younger audience, it wouldn't have been of much use to incorporate ultra-hard puzzles that you can't solve without consulting a walkthrough, so I'm generally fine with that.

PLAYTIME & REPLAYABILITYBeating the story took me roughly 3 hours, which is rather short for a game like this, but personally I will always prefer shorter games with tight gameplay over games that artificially extend the playtime by repeating the same levels or gameplay elements over and over.

Once you've played through the game, there's not much else to do apart from hunting the remaining achievements, however, there's one particular achievement that requires you to beat the game in less than 18 minutes, so that adds at least a bit of challenge and replayability to the game.

CONCLUSIONJourney of a Roach is an extremely cute, cheerful and overall fun game for a relaxing evening, so if you like P'n'C games (especially with a gameplay twist) and don't get putt off by the game's length, make sure to check it out!

You are a cockroach on a post nuclear war world where there seems to be no humans and animals/insects have gained an enourmous size and inteligence. Your friend finds a flower and wants to show it to you, but then an accident accurs, he falls and you fall with him, you both get trapped and something happens and he falls through a hole, then you go on your journey to find him. An stright point an click adventure.

The Pros

The game have a really charming style, good controls and nice narrative with likable characters and lighthearted story with cool puzzles.

The Flaws

For once, the cutcenes seem like more of a storyboard than a cutscene, very sketchy and simple, the only other negative is that the game is very short and the admission price is a bit too high (maybe 5$ worht of content).

Conclusion:

There is very little wrong with this game beside the price, is a cute little story that you should experience if possble.

Achievements are broken in Linux. The dev team knows this (they officially announced it), but seems to not give a flying frak, and haven't given any indication they're planning on fixing it. As such I cannot give this game a good review.

It's really a shame the dev team sucks so much, because I genuinely enjoyed playing this game. It's so well adapted to Linux+controller. The puzzles were excellent and the art was amazing. Too bad it's broken.

I did not like this. I did not like this at all. The setting is interesting, the story is okay and the controls are sometimes a bit too frustrating (why wouldn't I be able to walk on all walls and step over small pipes). And that's actually exactly what I expected from this game. It's okay to have janky controls. But it's not okay to have "nonsensical puzzle game logic". Every now and again I stumbled upon a puzzle that had the most illogical solution. Sometimes the thought bubble explanations are obtuse, sometimes the required items don't make sense, and sometimes the actual goal of the puzzle is illogical. For example - a bug asks us to find him a drink, but when you eventually find it he won't take it. Why? Because you apparently need to put a AA battery in it to make it an energy drink (simple logic right?). I have no idea how anyone supposed to come up with this solution without just trying all the items on other items and coming up with the solution by trial and error. And the game never gives you a reason why would you have to do it. Progressing in this game mostly means trying all the items you could find on all the intractable points in the current room and hopefully something will happen.If that's something you enjoy/can withstand, go for it. It's cheap on sales. Otherwise stay away.

Journey of a Roach is a point and click adventure game with a stylistic twist: as a cockroach, you can climb on nearly any surface, including the ceiling. This allows the main character, a cockroach named Jim, to traverse levels in a uniquely three-dimensional manner, with his main goal being to rescue his friend from a gang of kidnapping ants. The wall-crawling feature, along with the game's charmingly excitable characters, creative level design, and user-friendly puzzles, makes for a pleasant point and click experience.

Like most point and click adventure games, the main goal in Journey of a Roach is to collect various items and then use them in the correct locations. Often the items are in hard to reach locations that require creative climbing to get to. Sometimes you might have to combine items in your inventory so that they can be used to solve puzzles. The puzzles themselves are fairly straightforward, with nearby NPC's often giving small clues whenever you happen to get stuck.

At first the level design in Journey of a Roach seems rather simple, but as you go on they grow complex. The levels are often big and have several different branches of items to collect for multiple different puzzles at once. However, instead of overwhelming you, the amount of puzzles allows you to bounce back and forth between them when frustrated, minimizing the time you'll spend blindly wandering about wondering what to do.

Solutions for the puzzles, much like the chattering, nonsense voices of the characters in Journey of a Roach, are often silly and happily humorous. At one point I was asked to bring an ant a burger and I fashioned one out of a piece of sponge, a shoe, and a handkerchief in order to continue onward in the story. The game ends on an equally laugh-worthy and heartwarming note, making it a great game if you want a quick, light-hearted adventure.

I do not recommend this game to players who (like me) like to have proper dialogues. In this game you don't have any text but characters communicate with speech bubbles that contain images that are supposed to describe what a character wants to say. This is just something that I don't like. I prefer normal text-based talking in an adventure game.

From a technical prespective this game is well done. The mechanics of climing on the walls are nice but can also be annoying if you have to do a lot of backtracking.

Journey of a Roach is an adventure game that is in my opinion aimed for the more casual players. The game itself is not too long and most puzzles are not very hard, but it is great as light entertainment and a fresh breeze for those who are tired of the conventional scraping for survival post apocalyptic games.

The game-play is fairly creative being able (and having to) climb up on walls and ceilings to reach certain objects adds a bit of extra flavor to the conventional rub item A to item B mechanics. I am definitely sure that it's not worth the full price, my price would be no more than 4.99 USD / 3.99 EUR.

But I get it in one of my Humble Bundle packages so I can't complain (7/10).

Great little adventure game! It's witty and cute and a lot of fun to play. Finished it in 3 hours so it's not that long but still worth it in my opinion. Very high quality gameplay and visuals. Two thumbs up :D

Very nice indie game with its cute animations and cutscenes. The playthrough was short and puzzles weren't difficult but the experience was enjoyable none the less. For the sale price of $1.49 this is a great buy.

Just finished the overalll average game. I did enjoy most of it, and the drawings made me laugh. Bought it cheap and for that amount of money (around 1 eur) it is absolutly worth to play. Not for the full price tho.

The story ends a bit weak, which made it not satisfying for me. The puzzles are not too hard, apart from a few. I had to check a walkthrough once and few other times it took a lot of time to get an idea of the solution. Lot of trial and error.

In short, it is not a bad game, but also not a star. I really enjoyed the way it was setup, being able to walk on walls and ceilings. This gave the game a nice perspective. ALso I enjoyed the drawingstyle. A bit childish, but I don't mind that. Some funny pics there.

A genuinely charming, adorable game! And who would have thought a cockroach could be so gosh-danged adorable?!

This is a game entirely without dialogue or writing -- the instructions, the character's ideas, conversations, etc. are explained entirely in thought-bubble cartoons -- and it just WORKS. It's a game you could share internationally without ever worrying about a language barrier! And the game itself is loads of fun to play! Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which things like roaches, rats, bees, spiders. etc. are the lone surviving inhabitants, players take on the role of an adorable little roach who wants to save his accident-prone friend from a series of escalating perils so that they can enjoy a beautiful flower together -- the first flower seen in a very long time. The puzzles are fun and engaging, the characters are likeable, the controls are simple and fun, and many of the adventures and puzzles you encounter take full advantage of the little roach's ability to walk up walls and along ceilings.

Short and cute adventure game with a pretty innovative movement system that involves walking up walls/ceilings. Daedelic really needs to hire an inbetweener for their 2d animations on games so that the FMV aren't so out of timing with the in-game action IMO. It's kind of jarring to be in a semi-smooth 3d/2d environment and suddenly get slow flipbook style animation where you pause for 3-5 seconds in between frames.

This game is pretty painful. It's one of the "find random things in crazy places and just see what happens" sort of point and click games that doesnt take much actual skill or thought. Plus the whole screen-moves-when-you-walk-up-walls thing had my stomach doing bacflips.